CESSDA-ELSST

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The UK Data Service has been awarded separate funding to align and enhance the Humanities and Social Sciences Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET) and the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST). These two thesauri underpin resource discovery for both the UK Data Service and CESSDA, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives.

HASSET and ELSST are interdependent, however their content management and version release processes are currently different, resulting in the two being maintained separately. This project's aims are to maintain both, bring them into a single system and play a role in meeting the obligations for the new CESSDA organisation.

In particular, the project will develop the thesaurus user interface for the benefit of both the UK Data Service and the wider CESSDA community. The two thesauri will be merged into a single system which will serve the needs of both the UK Data Service and CESSDA by providing a single interface for content management. The work will enable a much more flexible interface providing views of thesaurus subsets or different views of the same content depending on research need and/or the researcher’s chosen language.

There will be a full review of intellectual property issues in order to ensure accurate accreditation and appropriate licences and contracts for contributors to, and users of, ELSST, the multilingual thesaurus (i.e. those European partners who have provided translations or partial translations).

The project's project officers undertake coordination activities required for the ongoing development of ELSST: overseeing the transfer of HASSET content into a new system; maintaining the content; establishing and maintaining quality control; taking day to day responsibility for the management, maintenance and further development of the thesaurus; contacting stakeholders; and support work to ensure appropriate management of IP in the thesaurus.

Updates on the progress of the project will be released via our ELSST blog.

OUR CONTRIBUTION

Principal Investigator: Matthew Woollard, Director of the UK Data Service